Research Provides New Insights into Nanoribbons

New method of fabricating graphene nanoribbons with zigzag-edged directions

On March 24, a team of 9 researchers announced that they have successfully developed a technology to provide a new direction for the fabrication of graphene nanoribbons with zigzag-edged directions.

This study is a collaboration among researchers, including Prof. Kwanpyo Kim (School of Natural Science) and Prof. Hu Young Jeong (School of Materials Science and Engineering) at UNIST, Dr. Won Chul Lee at Tyoko University, Dr. Jungwon Park at Harvard University, and Prof. Hoonkyung Lee at Konkuk Unviersity.

Prof. Kwanpyo Kim (School of Natural Science) and Prof. Hu Young Jeong (School of Materials Science and Engineering) at UNIST are posing for a portrait in front of the Advanced TEM, which they used to study the self-organized growth of inorganic AuCN nanowires.

According to the research team, “[With current technology] it has been difficult to fabricate graphene nanoribbons with zigzag-edged directions and only a few previous studies have achieved it so far.” This is due to graphene’s chemical inertness, the research team says. In fact, although Graphene’s chemical inertness makes it an excellent candicate for practical transparent electrodes, this makes it challenging to assemble inorganic nanomaterials on pristine graphene, and even more challenging to align them orderly.

The figure shows the directional growth of inorganic nanowires on graphene. During this incubation, the nanowires grow on the graphene surfaces along the specific lattice directions of the graphene.

This is an important discovery which overturns previous theories in that through this study, the research team was able to successfully present the self-organized growth of inorganic AuCN nanowires, which is almost one million times thinner than a human hair that grows directly on pristine graphene, aligning itself with zigzag lattice directions of single-layered pristine graphene.

The research team states, “This direct alignment can be utilized to extract and control crystallographic information about nanostructures, thus enabling us to fabricate graphene nanoribbons with zigzag-edged directions.”

Prof. Kim at UNIST says “This study not only provides new insights into nanoribbons, but this marks an important milestone in high mobility graphene devices.”

The research finding has been featured in the March 24, 2015 issue of Nature Nanotechnology, the world’s leading nanotechnology journal.